Minor spoilers to be found here. The event is far from over, but I do mention some of the players who are still alive and some chip counts. Read at your own peril

The split field days are done at the WSOP main event and today is a day off for all the players. On Friday, all of the players remaining will begin play at noon, all together for the first time. There are somewhere between 1200 and 1300 players left, a bit below the goal of starting tomorrow with 1400 players. Now is when the real tournament begins. 873 players will cash out, so at this point the players will be focused on making the money. The folks just looking for a good story are now thinking they’ve got a shot at winning, or at least finishing in the money, so play should tighten up and the bad call factor should be reduced a little bit. Bluffs might actually mean something. Below the fold I’ll put a list of some of the notable players still around:
The chip leader at this point is Dmitri Nobles with over 550K in chips. Never heard of him? I haven’t either. But that’s true of 95% of the players left. Still, there are some big names lurking around and still in the hunt, most prominently Daniel Negreanu. He’s in very good shape with 320K in chips, among the top 10 in stack size going into tomorrow. Other notables: Jeffrey Lisandro (211K), Dan Heimiller (200K), Allen Cunningham (172K), John Gale (170K), David Chiu (150K), last year’s champion Joe Hachem (142k), Ted Forrest (125K), Humberto Brenes (110K), David Pham (95K), Cyndy Violette (85K), Carlos Mortenson (82K), Josh Arieh (82K), Annie Duke (73K), Minh Nguyen (72K), Nam Le (63K), Tom McEvoy (60K), Chris Ferguson (60K), Freddy Deeb (58K), Hoyt Corkins (58K), David Grey (45K), Phil Ivey (20K).

When play begins, they should have one more hour to play at level 11, with blinds of 600/1200 an an ante of 50. So for those short stacks, like Phil Ivey, they’re running out of time to make a move. The average stack at this point is around 70K. You know ESPN will put Negreanu at the feature table first thing tomorrow and hope that he continues to do well. In terms of personality and name recognition, which equals ratings, they’re praying for him, Cyndy Violette, Joe Hachem, Josh Arieh, Chris Ferguson, Hoyt Corkins, Annie Duke and Phil Ivey. There are no major celebrities left in the field for them to root for. It might be interesting to see Daniel Negreanu and Annie Duke butt heads. Those two really, really don’t like each other.

Update: I was off a bit on my numbers, as fewer people finished day 2A than I thought. There are 1149 players left, so the average stack is about 76K. Only 286 players have to go out before cashing begins, so I would expect really tight play to start off tomorrow. Tomorrow is “moving day” for the tournament. The big stacks will attack the blinds constantly, knowing that the shorter stacks are playing tight, trying to survive until they’re in the money.

Comments

873 players will cash out, so at this point the players will be focused on making the money. The folks just looking for a good story are now thinking they’ve got a shot at winning, or at least finishing in the money,

Out of curiousity, how far do you have to make it to break even on your entrance fee/buy-in? And what was the buy-in for the event?

What’s the story there Ed? I heard Daniel made some rather disparaging remarks about her personal hygene at one point, but I don’t know what the deal is.

A few years ago, Daniel posted a really nasty message about Annie, calling her fake and two-faced and hypocritical. I don’t know if any of that is true, nor do I really care, but it’s long been a matter of public record that they really dislike each other (or at least, he really dislikes her).

Hmmm…well, hate matches do have a certain flair to them, whatever the source of the ill feelings. When Korchnoi played Karpov once (in chess), they had to have a board mounted under the table to prevent them from kicking each other. Or so the story went.

And it also would be interesting to see a woman go all the way, if that’s in the cards.